Mark Levin: ‘Unbridled Immigration, Legal and Illegal, Is Taking the Country Down’. * * *
*
“The watchdogs at Judicial Watch discovered documents that reveal how the Obama administration's close coordination with the Mexican government entices Mexicans to hop over the fence and on to the American dole.” Washington Times

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

WHAT THIS ARTICLE DID NOT COVER IS LA RAZA RACISM, AND THE COLD BLOODED MURDER OF MANY BLACKS BY MEXICAN GANGS “ETHNICALLY CLEANSING THEIR HOODS”.

Black Angelinos Harmed by Illegal Immigration, Ignored by Leaders

Perhaps no group of Americans is harmed more by mass immigration than black Americans, and no group of black Americans has been hit harder than those who live in Los Angeles. In response to increasing calls for help from black Angelinos, FAIR’s Field Department organized a community meeting to help local residents make their voices and concerns heard.

The August 6 meeting drew about 100 people from across the greater Los Angeles area. Black Angelinos expressed their frustration about the impact of mass immigration — particularly illegal immigration — on their communities, their children’s schools, and on their ability to find jobs. Among those who addressed the group was Jamiel Shaw Sr., whose 17-year-old son Jamiel Jr. was murdered outside his home by an illegal alien gang member who had recently been released from police custody. Notably absent from the event were any of Los Angeles’ black political leaders. Twenty-two elected officials were invited to listen to the concerns of their constituents and not a single one bothered to show up.

The event was far more than just an opportunity to air grievances. As FAIR has done across the country when political leaders have refused to address the concerns of citizens, the event offered an opportunity for people in the community to organize and network to force change from the grassroots up.
September 2011
*

In a policy statement posted on the White House website and in letters to leading members of Congress, the Obama administration declared what amounts to an administrative amnesty for nearly all illegal aliens without criminal records. Under the guise of setting enforcement priorities, the administration announced that it would review some 300,000 pending cases against deportable aliens, with the intent of dropping the cases, and would cease to initiate new proceedings against illegal aliens without criminal convictions.
The statement, posted on the White House website by Intergovernmental Affairs Director Cecilia Munoz, lists broad categories of illegal aliens whose cases are likely to be dismissed under the new policy. Simultaneously, in letters to Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and other Senate Democrats who support the DREAM Act, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano stated that potential DREAM Act beneficiaries would no longer be subject to removal.
The August 18th policy announcement takes dead aim not just at the integrity of U.S. immigration law, but on the constitutional separation of powers. Under our constitution, Congress has the exclusive authority to make immigration policies. It is the constitutional responsibility of the Executive Branch of government to carry out and enforce the laws passed by Congress whether the administration in office agrees with them or not. The timing of the announcement, while Congress was in recess, was also designed to limit the Legislative Branch’s ability to react.
The administration’s new policy offers illegal aliens more than relief from deportation. DHS indicated that those whose cases will be dropped will be eligible to apply for work authorization in the United States and would almost certainly receive it. Thus, in spite of repeated assertions by President Obama that he lacks the constitutional authority to grant amnesty to illegal aliens without legislative action by Congress, the policies being implemented by his administration amount to precisely that.
In addition to illegal aliens who would be eligible for amnesty under the DREAM Act—legislation that Congress has repeatedly declined to enact since it was first proposed in 2000—the policy would also protect illegal aliens who have family members in the United States. Even those who do not fall into those categories would be unlikely to face deportation so long as they refrained from committing other crimes in the U.S.
The administration offered the untenable excuse that enforcing laws against non-criminal aliens distracts from their effort to remove people who pose a greater danger to American society. Secretary Napolitano argued that deportation proceedings against non-criminal aliens are “clogging immigration court dockets” and consuming monetary and manpower resources from her department. While no one would dispute the need to prioritize the removal of violent criminals, no other legitimate law enforcement agency in the world would suggest that they should stop enforcing all other laws. It remains DHS’s responsibility to enforce all of the immigration laws enacted by Congress.
The administrative amnesty is clearly tied to President Obama’s re-election bid. The president has been under mounting pressure from Hispanic and illegal alien advocacy groups to take the steps his administration took on August 18. Concurrent with the policy announcements, the White House held a conference call with dozens of illegal alien advocacy groups to spell out the benefits that would be provided. The changes were greeted with praise by the illegal alien advocates. “Today’s announcement shows that this president is willing to put muscle behind his words and to use his power to intervene,” stated Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), Congress’s most outspoken amnesty supporter.
The responsibility to block the administration from carrying out this amnesty plan now rests with Congress when it returns to session. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), who termed the plan a “backdoor amnesty,” has already introduced legislation aimed at curbing the administration’s abuse of prosecutorial discretion. The Hinder the Administration’s Legalization Temptation Act (HALT) — H.R. 2497 — was introduced in July with the clear objective of preventing the administration from carrying out the very policies that are being expanded by this recent announcement.
FAIR immediately took a lead role in informing the American public about the policy and constitutional implications of the administration’s amnesty plan. In the aftermath of the announcement, FAIR spokespeople appeared on national and local television and radio, and in leading newspapers, denouncing the administration’s move. FAIR will also work with members of Congress in an effort to prevent the Obama administration from carrying out this harmful and unconstitutional quasi-amnesty.
September 2011

THE MEXICAN CRIME TIDAL WAVE SPREADS
ACROSS THE UNITED STATES

Everyday
there are 12 Americans murdered by Mexicans and 8 children molested!

California
Attorney Gen Kamala Harris announced that nearly HALF of all murders in
Mex-occupied CA are by MEX GANGS!

THE CA ATTORNEY GENERAL KAMALA HARRIS STATES THAT NEARLY HALF THE MURDER IN CA ARE BY MEXICAN GANGS.

OF THE TOP TEN MOST WANTED CRIMINALS ON HER LIST, ALL ARE MEXICANS.
OF THE TOP 200 MOST WANTED CRIMINALS IN LOS ANGELES, 176 ARE MEXICANS.

CA PUTS OUT $1.5 BILLION IN STATE PRISON COST TO HOUSE MEXICAN CRIMINALS!

Hispanics new majority sentenced to federal prison

By GARANCE BURKE -

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — More than half of all people sent to federal prison for committing felony crimes so far this year were Hispanic, a major demographic shift swollen by immigration offenses, according to a new government report released Tuesday.

Hispanics already outnumber all other ethnic groups sentenced to serve time in prison for federal felonies.

Hispanics reached a new milestone for the first time this year, making up the majority all federal felony offenders sentenced in the first nine months of fiscal year 2011, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Hispanics comprised 50.3 percent of all people sentenced in that time period, blacks 19.7 percent and whites 26.4 percent.

In comparison, last year Hispanics made up just 16 percent of the whole U.S. population.

The commission's statistics also reveal that sentences for felony immigration crimes — which include illegal crossing and other crimes such as alien smuggling — were responsible for most of the increase in the number of Hispanics sent to prison over the last decade.

The demographic change in who is being sent to federal prison has already prompted debate among commissioners and experts studying the impact of expedited court hearings along the border.

"Statistics like this have to start drawing attention to this country's immigration policies and what we're doing, if this is one of the results," said Fordham University Law School professor Deborah Denno, an expert on racial disparities in the criminal justice system. "The implications for Hispanics are huge when you think of the number of families affected by having their breadwinners put away for what in some cases would be considered a non-violent offense."

Since he took office in 2001, Bush said in Tucson, Ariz., U.S. border agents have apprehended and sent home 4.5 million illegal aliens, "including more than 350,000 with criminal records."

Astonishing. That is 75,000 criminals a year, 200 felons a day, for the last five years, trying to break into our country to rape, rob and kill, and molest our children. Of the millions of illegals who succeeded in breaking in on Bush's watch, how many came to rape, rob and murder, like John Lee Malvo, the Beltway sniper?

*

MEXICO DOES NOT WANT THEIR CRIMINALS BACK! LET AMERICANS PAY FOR THEIR PRISON TIME AND CRIME WAVES!

“The Obama Administration seems to be heeding to Mexico’s request by openly halting the deportation of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants. Additionally, the administration has a “backdoor amnesty” plan to legalize millions of undocumented aliens in case Congress doesn’t pass legislation to do it.”

THE MEXICAN CRIME TIDAL WAVE SPREADS
ACROSS THE UNITED STATES

Everyday
there are 12 Americans murdered by Mexicans and 8 children molested!

California
Attorney Gen Kamala Harris announced that nearly HALF of all murders in
Mex-occupied CA are by MEX GANGS!

Some of the most violent criminals at large today are illegal aliens. Yet in
cities where the crime these aliens commit is highest, the police cannot use
the most obvious tool to apprehend them: their immigration status. In Los
Angeles, for example, dozens of members of a ruthless Salvadoran prison gang
have sneaked back into town after having been deported for such crimes as
murder, assault with a deadly weapon, and drug trafficking. Police officers
know who they are and know that their mere presence in the country is a felony.
Yet should a cop arrest an illegal gangbanger for felonious reentry, it is he
who will be treated as a criminal, for violating the LAPD’s rule against
enforcing immigration law.

The LAPD’s ban on immigration enforcement mirrors bans in immigrant-saturated
cities around the country, from New York and Chicago to San Diego, Austin, and
Houston. These “sanctuary
policies” generally prohibit city employees, including the cops, from reporting
immigration violations to federal authorities.

Such laws testify to the sheer political power of immigrant lobbies, a power so
irresistible that police officials shrink from even mentioning the
illegal-alien crime wave. “We can’t even talk
about it,” says a frustrated LAPD captain. “People are afraid of a backlash
from Hispanics.” Another LAPD commander in a predominantly Hispanic,
gang-infested district sighs: “I would get a firestorm of criticism if I talked
about [enforcing the immigration law against illegals].” Neither captain would
speak for attribution.

But however pernicious in themselves, sanctuary rules are a symptom of a much
broader disease: the nation’s near-total loss of control over immigration
policy. Fifty years ago, immigration policy might have driven immigration
numbers, but today the numbers drive policy. The nonstop increase of
immigration is reshaping the language and the law to dissolve any distinction
between legal and illegal aliens and, ultimately, the very idea of national
borders.

It is a measure of how topsy-turvy the immigration environment has become that
to ask police officials about the illegal-alien crime problem feels like a
gross faux pas, not done in polite company. And a police official asked to
violate this powerful taboo will give a strangled response—or, as in the case
of a New York deputy commissioner, break off communication altogether.
Meanwhile, millions of illegal aliens work, shop, travel, and commit crimes in
plain view, utterly secure in their de facto immunity from the immigration law.

I asked the Miami Police Department’s spokesman, Detective Delrish Moss, about
his employer’s policy on lawbreaking illegals. In September, the force arrested
a Honduran visa violator for seven vicious rapes. The previous year, Miami cops
had had the suspect in
custody for lewd and lascivious molestation, without checking his immigration
status. Had they done so, they would have discovered his visa overstay, a
deportable offense, and so could have forestalled the rapes. “We have shied
away from unnecessary involvement dealing with immigration issues,” explains
Moss, choosing his words carefully, “because of our large immigrant
population.”

Police commanders may not want to discuss, much less respond to, the
illegal-alien crisis, but its magnitude for law enforcement is startling. Some
examples:

• In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which
total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive
felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.

• A confidential California Department of Justice study reported in 1995 that
60 percent of the 20,000-strong 18th Street Gang in southern California is
illegal; police officers say the proportion is actually much greater. The
bloody gang collaborates with the Mexican Mafia,
the dominant force in California prisons, on complex drug-distribution schemes,
extortion, and drive-by assassinations, and commits an assault or robbery every
day in L.A. County. The gang
has grown dramatically over the last two decades by recruiting recently arrived
youngsters, most of them illegal, from Central America and Mexico.

• The leadership of the Columbia Lil’ Cycos gang, which uses murder and
racketeering to control the drug market around L.A.’s MacArthur Park, was about
60 percent illegal in 2002, says former assistant U.S. attorney Luis Li.
Francisco Martinez, a Mexican Mafia member and an illegal alien, controlled the
gang from prison, while serving time for felonious reentry following
deportation.

Good luck finding any reference to such facts in official crime analysis. The
LAPD and the L.A. city attorney recently requested an injunction against drug
trafficking in Hollywood, targeting the 18th Street Gang and the “non–gang
members” who sell drugs in Hollywood for the gang. Those non–gang members are
virtually all illegal Mexicans, smuggled into the country by a ring organized
by 18th Street bigs. The Mexicans pay off their transportation debts to the
gang by selling drugs; many soon realize how lucrative that line of work is and
stay in the business.

Cops and prosecutors universally know the immigration status of these non-gang
“Hollywood dealers,” as the city attorney calls them, but the gang injunction
is assiduously silent on the matter. And if a Hollywood officer were to arrest
an illegal dealer (known on the
street as a “border brother”) for his immigration status, or even notify the
Immigration and Naturalization Service (since early 2003, absorbed into the new
Department of Homeland Security), he would face severe discipline for violating
Special Order 40, the city’s sanctuary policy.

L.A.’s sanctuary law and all others like it contradict a key 1990s policing
discovery: the Great Chain of Being in criminal behavior. Pick up a
law-violator for a “minor” crime, and you might well prevent a major crime:
enforcing graffiti and turnstile-jumping laws nabs you murderers and robbers.
Enforcing known immigration violations, such as reentry following deportation,
against known felons, would be even more productive. LAPD officers recognize illegal
deported gang members all the time—flashing gang signs at court hearings for
rival gangbangers, hanging out on the corner, or casing a target. These illegal
returnees are, simply by being in the country after deportation, committing a
felony (in contrast to garden-variety illegals on their first trip to the U.S.,
say, who are only committing a misdemeanor). “But if I see a deportee from the
Mara Salvatrucha [Salvadoran prison] gang crossing the street, I know I can’t
touch him,” laments a Los Angeles gang officer. Only if the deported felon has
given the officer some other reason to stop him, such as an observed narcotics
sale, can the cop accost him—but not for the mmigration felony.

The stated reasons for sanctuary policies are that they encourage illegal-alien
crime victims and witnesses to cooperate with cops without fear of deportation,
and that they encourage illegals to take advantage of city services like health
care and education (to whose maintenance few illegals have contributed a single
tax dollar, of course). There has never been any empirical verification that
sanctuary laws actually accomplish these goals—and no one has ever suggested
not enforcing drug laws, say, for fear of intimidating drug-using crime
victims. But in any case, this official rationale could be honored by limiting
police use of immigration laws to some subset of immigration violators:
deported felons, say, or repeat criminal offenders whose immigration status
police already know.

The real reason cities prohibit their cops and other employees from immigration
reporting and enforcement is, like nearly everything else in immigration
policy, the numbers. The immigrant population has grown so large that public
officials are terrified of alienating it, even at the expense of ignoring the
law and tolerating violence. In 1996, a breathtaking Los Angeles Times exposé
on the 18th Street Gang, which included descriptions of innocent bystanders
being murdered by laughing cholos (gang members), revealed the rate of
illegal-alien
membership in the gang. In response to the public outcry, the Los Angeles City
Council ordered the police to reexamine Special Order 40. You would have
thought it had suggested reconsidering Roe v. Wade. A police commander warned
the council: “This is going to open
a significant, heated debate.” City Councilwoman Laura Chick put on a brave
front: “We mustn’t be afraid,” she declared firmly.

But of course immigrant pandering trumped public safety. Law-abiding residents
of gang-infested neighborhoods may live in terror of the tattooed gangbangers
dealing drugs, spraying graffiti, and shooting up rivals outside their homes,
but such anxiety can never equal a
politician’s fear of offending Hispanics. At the start of the reexamination
process, LAPD deputy chief John White had argued that allowing the department
to work closely with the INS would give cops another tool for getting gang
members off the streets. Trying to build a homicide case, say, against an
illegal gang member is often futile, he explained, since witnesses fear deadly
retaliation if they cooperate with the police. Enforcing an immigration
violation would allow the cops to lock up the murderer right now, without
putting a witness’s life at risk.

But six months later, Deputy Chief White had changed his tune: “Any broadening
of the policy gets us into the immigration business,” he asserted. “It’s a
federal law-enforcement issue, not a local law-enforcement issue.” Interim
police chief Bayan Lewis told the L.A. Police ommission: “It is not the time. It
is not the day to look at Special Order 40.”

Nor will it ever be, as long as immigration numbers continue to grow. After
their brief moment of truth in 1996, Los Angeles politicians have only grown
more adamant in defense of Special Order 40. After learning that cops in the
scandal-plagued Rampart Division had cooperated with the INS to try to uproot
murderous gang members from the community, local politicians threw a fit,
criticizing district commanders for even allowing INS agents into their station
houses. In
turn, the LAPD strictly disciplined the offending officers. By now, big-city
police chiefs are unfortunately just as determined to defend sanctuary policies
as the politicians who appoint them; not so the rank and file, however, who see
daily the benefit that an immigration tool would bring. But even were
immigrant-saturated cities to discard their sanctuary policies and start
enforcing immigration violations where public safety demands it, the
resource-starved immigration authorities couldn’t handle the overwhelming
additional workload.

The chronic shortage of manpower to oversee, and detention space to house,
aliens as they await their deportation hearings (or, following an order of
removal from a federal judge, their actual deportation) has forced immigration
officials to practice a constant triage. Long ago, the feds stopped trying to
find and deport aliens who had “merely” entered the country illegally through
stealth or fraudulent documents. Currently, the only types of illegal aliens
who run any risk of catching federal attention are those who have been
convicted of an “aggravated felony” (a particularly egregious crime) or who
have been deported following conviction for an
aggravated felony and who have reentered (an offense punishable with 20 years
in jail).

That triage has been going on for a long time, as former INS investigator Mike
Cutler, who worked with the NYPD catching Brooklyn drug dealers in the 1970s,
explains. “If you arrested someone you wanted to detain, you’d go to your boss
and start a bidding war,” Cutler recalls. “You’d say: 'My guy ran three blocks,
threw a couple of punches, and had six pieces of ID.' The boss would turn to
another agent: 'Next! Whaddid your guy do?' 'He ran 18 blocks, pushed
over an old lady, and had a gun.' ” But such one-upmanship was usually
fruitless. “Without the jail space,” explains Cutler, “it was like the Fish and
Wildlife Service; you’d tag their ear
and let them go.”

But even when immigration officials actually arrest someone, and even if a
judge issues a final deportation order (usually after years of litigation and
appeals), they rarely have the manpower to put the alien on a bus or plane and
take him across the border. Second alternative: detain him pending removal.
Again, inadequate space and staff. In the early 1990s, for example, 15 INS
officers were in charge of the deportation of approximately 85,000 aliens (not
all of them criminals) in New York City. The agency’s actual response to final
orders of removal was what is known as a “run letter”—a notice asking the
deportable alien kindly to show up in a month or
two to be deported, when the agency might be able to process him. Results: in
2001, 87 percent of deportable aliens who received run letters disappeared, a
number that was even higher—94 percent—if they were from terror-sponsoring
countries.

To other law-enforcement agencies, the feds’ triage often looks like complete
indifference to immigration violations. Testifying to Congress about the Queens
rape by illegal Mexicans, New York’s criminal justice coordinator defended the
city’s failure to notify the INS after the rapists’ previous arrests on the
ground that the agency wouldn’t have responded anyway. “We have time and time
again been unable to reach INS on the phone,” John Feinblatt said last
February. “When we reach them on the phone, they require that we write a
letter. When we write a letter, they quire that it be by a superior.”

Criminal aliens also interpret the triage as indifference. John Mullaly a
former NYPD homicide detective, estimates that 70 percent of the drug dealers
and other criminals in Manhattan’s Washington Heights were illegal. Were
Mullaly to threaten an illegal-alien thug in custody that his next stop would
be El Salvador unless he cooperated, the criminal would just laugh, knowing
that the INS would never show up. The message could not be clearer: this is a
culture
that can’t enforce its most basic law of entry. If policing’s broken-windows
theory is correct, the failure to enforce one set of rules breeds overall
contempt for the law.

The sheer number of criminal aliens overwhelmed an innovative program that
would allow immigration officials to complete deportation hearings while a
criminal was still in state or federal prison, so that upon his release he
could be immediately ejected without taking
up precious INS detention space. But the process, begun in 1988, immediately
bogged down due to the numbers—in 2000, for example, nearly 30 percent of
federal prisoners were foreign-born. The agency couldn’t find enough pro bono
attorneys to represent such an army of criminal aliens (who have extensive
due-process rights in contesting deportation) and so would have to request
delay after delay. Or enough immigration judges would not be available. In 1997,
the INS simply had no record of a whopping 36 percent of foreign-born inmates
who had been released from federal and four state prisons without any review of
their deportability. They included 1,198
aggravated felons, 80 of whom were soon re-arrested for new crimes.

Resource starvation is not the only reason for federal inaction. The INS was a
creature of immigration politics, and INS district directors came under great
pressure from local politicians to divert scarce resources into distribution of
such “benefits” as permanent residency, citizenship, and work permits, and away
from criminal or other investigations. In the late 1980s, for example, the INS
refused to join an FBI task force against Haitian drug trafficking in Miami,
fearing criticism for “Haitian-bashing.” In 1997, after Hispanic activists
protested a much-publicized raid that netted nearly two dozen illegals, the
Border Patrol said that it would no longer join Simi Valley, California,
probation officers on home searches of illegal-alien-dominated gangs.

The disastrous Citizenship USA project of 1996 was a luminous case of politics
driving the INS to sacrifice enforcement to “benefits.” When, in the early
1990s, the prospect of welfare reform drove immigrants to apply for citizenship
in record numbers to preserve their welfare eligibility, the Clinton
administration, seeing a political bonanza in hundreds of thousands of new
welfare-dependent citizens, ordered the naturalization process radically
expedited. Thanks to relentless administration pressure, processing errors in
1996 were 99 percent in New York and 90 percent in Los Angeles, and tens of
thousands of aliens with criminal records, including for murder and armed
robbery, were naturalized.

Another powerful political force, the immigration bar association, has won from
Congress an elaborate set of due-process rights for criminal aliens that can
keep them in the country ndefinitely. Federal probation officers in Brooklyn
are supervising two illegals—a Jordanian and an Egyptian with Saudi
citizenship—who look “ready to blow up the Statue of Liberty,” according to a
probation official, but the officers can’t get rid of them. The Jordanian had
been caught fencing stolen Social Security and tax-refund checks; now he sells
phone cards, which he uses himself to make untraceable calls. The Saudi’s
offense: using a fraudulent Social Security number to get employment—a
puzzlingly unnecessary scam, since he receives large sums from the Middle East,
including from millionaire relatives. But intelligence links him to terrorism,
so presumably he worked in order not to draw attention to himself. Currently,
he changes his cell phone every month. Ordinarily such a minor offense would
not be prosecuted, but the government, fearing that he had terrorist intentions,
used whatever it had to put him in prison.

Now, probation officers desperately want to see the duo out of the country, but
the two ex-cons have hired lawyers, who are relentlessly fighting their
deportation. “Due process allows you to stay for years without an
adjudication,” says a probation officer in frustration. “A regular immigration
attorney can keep you in the country for three years, a high-priced one for
ten.” In the meantime, Brooklyn probation officials are watching the bridges.

Even where immigration officials successfully nab and deport criminal aliens,
the reality, says a former federal gang prosecutor, is that “they all come
back. They can’t make it in Mexico.” The tens of thousands of illegal
farmworkers and dishwashers who overpower U.S. border controls every year carry
in their wake thousands of brutal assailants and terrorists who use the same
smuggling industry and who benefit from the same irresistible odds: there are
so many more of
them than the Border Patrol.

For, of course, the government’s inability to keep out criminal aliens is part
and parcel of its inability to patrol the border, period. For decades, the INS
had as much effect on the migration of
millions of illegals as a can tied to the tail of a tiger. And the immigrants
themselves, despite the press cliché of hapless aliens living fearfully in the
shadows, seemed to regard immigration
authorities with all the concern of an elephant for a flea.

Certainly fear of immigration officers is not in evidence among the hundreds of
illegal day laborers who hang out on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, New York, in
front of money wire services, travel agencies, immigration-attorney offices,
and phone arcades, all catering to the
local Hispanic population (as well as to drug dealers and terrorists). “There
is no chance of getting caught,” cheerfully explains Rafael, an Ecuadoran. Like
the dozen Ecuadorans and Mexicans on his particular corner, Rafael is hoping
that an SUV seeking carpenters for $100 a day will show up soon. “We don’t
worry, because we’re not doing anything wrong. I know it’s illegal; I need the
papers, but here, nobody asks you for papers.”

Even the newly fortified Mexican border, the one spot where the government
really tries to prevent illegal immigration, looms as only a minor
inconvenience to the day laborers. The odds, they realize, are overwhelmingly
in their favor. Miguel, a reserved young carpenter, crossed the border at
Tijuana three years ago with 15 others. Border Patrol spotted them, but with
six officers to 16 illegals, only five got caught. In illegal border crossings,
you get what you pay for, Miguel says. If you try to shave on the fee, the
coyotes will abandon you at the first problem. Miguel’s wife was flying into
New York from Los Angeles that very day; it had cost him $2,200 to get her
across the border. “Because I pay, I don’t worry,” he says complacently.

The only way to dampen illegal immigration and its attendant train of criminals
and terrorists—short of an economic revolution in the sending countries or an
impregnably militarized border—is to remove the jobs magnet. As long as
migrants know they can easily get work, they will find ways to evade border
controls. But enforcing laws against illegal labor is among government’s lowest
priorities. In 2001, only 124 agents nationwide were trying to find and
prosecute the hundreds of thousands of employers and millions of illegal aliens
who violate the employment laws, the Associated Press reports.

Even were immigration officials to devote adequate resources to worksite
investigations, not much would change, because their legal weapons are so weak.
That’s no accident: though it is a crime to hire illegal aliens, a coalition of
libertarians, business lobbies, and left-wing advocates has consistently
blocked the fraud-proof form of work authorization necessary to enforce that
ban. Libertarians have erupted in hysteria at such proposals as a toll-free
number to the Social Security Administration for employers to confirm Social
Security numbers. Hispanics warn just as stridently that helping employers
verify work eligibility would result in discrimination
against Hispanics—implicitly conceding that vast numbers of Hispanics work
illegally.

The result: hiring practices in illegal-immigrant-saturated industries are a
charade. Millions of illegal workers pretend to present valid documents, and
thousands of employers pretend to
believe them. The law doesn’t require the employer to verify that a worker is
actually qualified to work, and as long as the proffered documents are not
patently phony—scrawled with red crayon on a matchbook, say—the employer will
nearly always be exempt from liability merely by having eyeballed them. To find
an employer guilty of violating the ban on hiring illegal aliens, immigration
authorities must prove that he knew he was getting fake papers—an almost
insurmountable burden. Meanwhile, the market for counterfeit documents has
exploded: in one month alone in 1998, immigration authorities seized nearly 2
million of them in Los Angeles, destined for immigrant workers, welfare
seekers, criminals, and terrorists.

For illegal workers and employers, there is no downside to the employment
charade. If immigration officials ever do try to conduct an industry-wide
investigation—which will at least net the illegal employees, if not the
employers—local congressmen will almost certainly head it off. An INS inquiry
into the Vidalia-onion industry in Georgia was not only aborted by Georgia’s
congressional delegation; it actually resulted in a local amnesty for the
growers’ illegal workforce. The downside to complying with the spirit of the
employment law, on the other hand, is considerable. Ethnic advocacy groups are
ready to picket employers who dismiss illegal workers, and employers understandably
fear being undercut by less scrupulous competitors.

Of the incalculable changes in American politics, demographics, and culture
that the continuing surge of migrants is causing, one of the most profound is
the breakdown of the distinction between legal and illegal entry. Everywhere,
illegal aliens receive free public education and free medical care at taxpayer
expense; 13 states offer them driver’s licenses. States everywhere have been
pushed to grant illegal aliens college scholarships and reduced in-state
tuition. One hundred banks, over 800 law-enforcement agencies, and dozens of
cities accept an identification card created by Mexico to credentialize illegal
Mexican aliens in the U.S. The Bush administration has given its blessing to
this matricula consular card, over the strong protest of the FBI, which warns
that the gaping security loopholes that the card creates make itboon to money launderers, immigrant
smugglers, and terrorists. Border authorities have already caught an Iranian
man sneaking across the border this year, Mexican matricula card in hand.

Hispanic advocates have helped blur the distinction between a legal and an
illegal resident by asserting that differentiating the two is an act of
irrational bigotry. Arrests of illegal aliens inside the
border now inevitably spark protests, often led by the Mexican government, that
feature signs calling for “no más racismo.” Immigrant advocates use the
language of “human rights” to appeal
to an authority higher than such trivia as citizenship laws. They attack the
term “amnesty” for implicitly acknowledging the validity of borders. Indeed,
grouses Illinois congressman Luis
Gutierrez, “There’s an implication that somehow you did something wrong and you
need to be forgiven.”

Illegal aliens and their advocates speak loudly about what they think the U.S.
owes them, not vice versa. “I believe they have a right . . . to work, to drive
their kids to school,” said California
assemblywoman Sarah Reyes. An immigration agent says that people he stops “get
in your face about their rights, because our failure to enforce the law
emboldens them.” Taking this idea to its extreme, Joaquín Avila, a UCLA Chicano
studies professor and law lecturer, argues that to deny non-citizens the vote,
especially in the many California cities where they constitute the majority, is
a form of apartheid.

Yet no poll has ever shown that Americans want more open borders. Quite the
reverse. By a huge majority—at least 60 percent—they want to rein in
immigration, and they endorse an observation that Senator Alan Simpson made 20
years ago: Americans “are fed up with
efforts to make them feel that [they] do not have that fundamental right of any
people—to decide who will join them and help form the future country in which
they and their posterity will live.” But if the elites’ and the advocates’ idea
of giving voting rights to non-citizen majorities catches on—and don’t be
surprised if it does—Americans could be faced with the ultimate absurdity of
people outside the social compact making rules for those inside it.

However the nation ultimately decides to rationalize its chaotic and incoherent
immigration system, surely all can agree that, at a minimum, authorities should
expel illegal-alien criminals swiftly. Even on the grounds of protecting
non-criminal illegal immigrants, we should start by junking sanctuary policies.
By stripping cops of what may be their only immediate tool to remove felons
from the community, these policies leave law-abiding immigrants prey to crime.

But the non-enforcement of immigration laws in general has an even more
destructive effect. In many immigrant communities, assimilation into gangs
seems to be outstripping assimilation into civic culture. Toddlers are learning
to flash gang signals and hate the police, reports the Los Angeles Times. In
New York City, “every high school has its Mexican gang,” and most 12- to
14-year-olds have already joined, claims Ernesto Vega, an illegal 11-year-old
Mexican. Such
pathologies only worsen when the first lesson that immigrants learn about U.S.
law is that Americans don’t bother to enforce it. “Institutionalizing illegal
immigration creates a mindset in people that anything goes in the U.S.,”
observes Patrick Ortega, the news and public-affairs director of Radio Nueva
Vida in southern California. “It creates a new subculture, with a sequela of
social ills.” It is broken windows writ large.

For the sake of immigrants and native-born Americans alike, it’s time to decide
what our immigration policy is—and enforce it.

The Obama administration has arrogantly refused to enforce existing immigration laws, and states have been left with no option but to enforce the laws and protect their citizens themselves.

September 6, 2011

Enforce Immigration Laws

To the Editor: “The Nation’s Cruelest Immigration Law” (editorial, Aug. 29), about a lawsuit by four church leaders against new restrictions by Alabama on undocumented immigrants, says that those who support enforcing immigration laws “have made many in this country forget who and what we are.” Indeed, I think The New York Times seems to have forgotten who and what we are. The United States was founded on law and justice. The only earthly hope of protecting the equality and dignity of all mankind is with a rule of law that holds both the janitor and the senator completely equal in both benefit and constraint. This was the founders’ dream. We are a nation of immigrants, but we are a nation of legal immigrants. Failing to enforce our immigration laws encourages more illegal immigration, which unjustly prolongs the wait of legal immigrants who are playing by the book and who have often waited years to become American citizens. The Obama administration has arrogantly refused to enforce existing immigration laws, and states have been left with no option but to enforce the laws and protect their citizens themselves. Indeed, in the first half of this year alone, nearly 250 new immigration laws and resolutions were enacted in 40 states. Enforcing the law is not mean-spirited. Rather, it is a noble element of the American spirit. Enforcing immigration laws protects American lives, establishes a fair process for legal immigrants in search of freedom and ensures that America remains the beacon of freedom for the entire family of mankind.

TRENT FRANKS

Peoria, Ariz., Aug. 30, 2011 The writer, a Republican, is a member of the House of Representatives from Arizona.

*ON THE IMMORALITY OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATIONBy FATHER PATRICK J BASCIO

*http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/06/immorality-of-illegal-immigration-by.htmlGET THIS BOOK!*ON THE IMMORALITY OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATIONBy FATHER PATRICK J BASCIOEditorial Reviews

Father Bascio presents a strikingly different perspective on illegal immigration from that of most Christian clergymen. He turns his spotlight on the harm of officially tolerated illegal immigration to America's own struggling workers in the form of joblessness, shrinking wages and poorer working conditions. African-American workers, already plagued by job discrimination, bear the heaviest burden of the illegal invasion, which locks them out of many workplaces or drives wages below acceptable levels. The chronic non-enforcement of immigration laws is no accident: Congress has little stomach for ending something so profitable for their most powerful donors and the voters they can muster. The author fears that many committed Christians are blinded to these abuses by their church leaders' preoccupation with charity toward illegal aliens, while ignoring the plight of millions of low-wage Americans. He deftly rebuts the self-serving myth of employers' and politicians' that illegals "do jobs Americans won't do." Bascio also sees the profit motive behind legal immigration policies that lure the third world's best and brightest to America, stripping poorer nations of their physicians, teachers and scientists. As a Catholic priest, the author admits the unpleasantness of taking a position not shared by his Church's hierarchy, which is driven by the prospect of rising membership. Bascio sees unchecked illegal immigration as having grave consequences for overall U.S. tranquility: disdain for the rule of law, street gangs, document fraud and identity theft, staggering welfare and education costs and creeping "Balkanization" that threatens the national principle of E Pluribus Unum. Father Bascio's book is a resounding appeal to Christians to re-examine their churches' conventional view of illegal immigration and consider the hardship it brings for fellow Americans and its dangers for the nation as a whole. ________________________________________Product Details• Paperback: 228 pages • Publisher: AuthorHouse (September 9, 2009) • Language: English • ISBN-10: 1449001858 • ISBN-13: 978-1449001858 *http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2011/04/obama-promises-la-raza-no-e-verify-open.htm